There's a photo that’s fascinated me since the first time I saw it.
It's one of my mom on her fourth birthday, which I know because of the inscription on the back. She’s nuzzling her own mother, both of them seated on the stage of a sixties-era venue, and my grandmother is gazing into the distance with a smile.
It’s a very sweet moment. It’s also a very strange photo for me, because I never knew them like this.
The relationship I knew of my mom and her mom was one of seething anger (my grandma’s) and constant hurt and defensiveness (my mom’s.) Theirs was a pain that began long before I arrived, but that cast a shadow over my childhood, and everything in my mother’s life.
I assumed it had always been this way.
I found the picture while digging through a great aunt’s box of photos - an aunt I’d found when I began searching genealogy sites for information about my family, and someone who had known my mom as a child.
I drove to Southern California to visit this aunt when my daughter was five months old, and stayed up after bedtime sifting through her old family photos and listening to stories.
When I asked my aunt what she remembered of my mom as a child, she said my mom had seemed lonely. “We’d go out to dinner, your grandparents and me and your mom,” she said. “And they mostly ignored her,” she continued. “She was there but…it was like she wasn’t. It didn’t feel right, the way they treated her.”
Until this moment I’d sort of postured myself as a family genealogist, asking questions and taking notes from a place of collected curiosity. But to hear how early my mom’s loneliness had begun, a loneliness that had never really left, and one I’d tried so hard to fill as a child…something broke within. I burst into tears at my aunt’s kitchen table.
She began apologizing for saying something she shouldn’t have.
“No, no,” I said. “It’s just, I…I wish it had been different for her.”
How can I be so sad about things that happened so long ago? I wondered on the drive home.
And another question crept as my daughter slept in the backseat…
What had gone so wrong for my grandma and my mom?
***
Around this same time, I awoke around 3am one morning and couldn’t get the following lines of a poem out of head. I got out of bed, wrote them down, and have never written anything like them before or since:
She’s back to sleep but I’m wide awake
I rest my hands on my still-soft belly, feel the bump-bump-bump of my heart,
And think back to when I wondered, is this my heartbeat or is this hers?
The stripe down my middle remains,
like a map creased from an epic trip, a marker of what was
Her hot breaths now in and out beside me, belly full, dreaming of places I can’t go,
Not even in my own dreams, as Kahlil Gibran says
Back when I was still swollen with her burgeoning life, the bump bump bump like an overlapping chorus of every mother ever
Her heartbeat, or mine?
Where do I stop, where does she begin?
When I was just a little girl, patting mommy’s back,
Don’t be sad, I pleaded, my small hand against her as she sobbed
Is this mine or is this hers?
Like my mom wondered, and her mother and her mother,
The pain of generations transformed into hot anger in one, depression in the next,
Morphed into hands slapping, accusations and insults,
Ugliness and dishes flying,
My small body ushered upstairs amid theatrics of a mother/daughter bond gone sour,
Don’t be sad mommy, I pleaded
Is this mine or is this hers?
Absorbing the hurt like a phantom limb growing, the pain an accidental appendage
And when that limb was suddenly hacked off the phantom remained,
Still throbbing, still swinging, the ghost of mothers past, no target anymore, just aching,
Bump, bump, bump,
Where does this go?
Is this mine or is this hers?
And now when the anger leaps off my breath, when my tears run hot and the pain still pulses
And that electric current of hurt jumps off my inherited limb, longing for a target,
I don’t want her near me, don’t want her to have this.
I want her small body free from the phantom limb
But like blue eyes or big feet, her inheritance percolates the bedroom walls
An overlapping chorus from her mother’s mother’s mother,
The living bow from which her arrow was shot
The heartbeat continues, bump bump bump
And I rest my hand on my still soft belly, listen to her hot breath beside me,
I vow to do my best to heal my phantom limb
But I wonder if someday
She’ll lie here like I did, hand resting on her own middle,
The bump bump bump of the overlapping chorus, the hot breath in and out beside her,
And the question will still remain,
Where do I stop?
Where does she begin?
***
My oldest daughter’s fourth birthday was last summer.
She requested a mermaid and pirate themed party, and it turned out to be one of those crazy hot Sacramento days (108 degrees) where we only survived because of an octopus sprinkler that misted us the entire time.
Photo by Robert Bye on Unsplash
She ran around in a mermaid outfit, face paint dripping down her temples with sweat, and it was this beautiful, messy, joyful day. As we opened presents after everyone had left, I thought about the picture of my mom on her own fourth birthday.
These parallel moments felt like a switchback of a steep trail. One where you wind back and forth across a mountain, and each time you turn you’re just below the switch above, a place so far away, but also right there.
Like the thin places the Celtics talk about - places where time loses its linear nature, and the veil between one life and the next is almost non-existent.
Had they felt a messy, hot, sticky joy that day, too? I wondered.
***
In the book the book Untamed, Glennon Doyle wrote,
“Parents love their children. I have met no exceptions. Love is a river, and there are times when impediments stop the flow of love. Mental illness, addictions, shame, narcissism, fear passed down by religious and cultural institutions–these are boulders that interrupt love’s flow.
‘…the one who couldn’t love you–her love was impeded. That love was there–swirling, festering, vivacious in its desperation for release. It was there, it is there, all for you. That love exists. It just couldn’t get past the boulder.”
***
My mother’s mother got dementia at the end of her life.
Visiting my grandmother during a short hospital stay toward the end of her life
I’ll never forget walking into the room to greet her, something I’d done so many times before, and being met with something I’d never seen before…joy.
“You are so beautiful,” she said earnestly, her smile beaming. “I’m so happy to see you.”
She’d never been happy to see me, not that I could remember at least. But here in this devastation of a mind that had forgotten so much…she’d forgotten the pain, as well.
“You look beautiful too,” I said, meaning it.
***
When we finished opening presents after my daughter’s birthday party, I called her over. “Do you see this picture?” I asked my daughter, pointing to the one of my mom and her mom. “This is your great grandma, and your grandma deLise,” I said. "She was four in this picture too.”
Then I had an idea: I asked her to give me a kiss on the cheek and called my partner over with a camera. In some sort of miracle she agreed, and we struck this pose.
Two messy, sticky, imperfect mother daughter moments.
***
November 26th 2023 was ten years since my mom died. My grandmother left soon after her.
As I travel further and further from the point where we all shared a path, I never know when I’m going to approach a switchback….a thin place.
I understand new layers with each step, and while I don’t think it’s my job to heal for every generation behind me, I’ve now come to trust that I’m not alone in these places: that my mother and her mother and the legions of mothers behind them both are whispering as I walk…
It is safe to let go
This is not your pain to carry
Write a new story
I trust that as I do so, the love rushing through me springs from an ancient river, a place where every mother before me is able to be present, open, loving. That I don’t need to reach back in time to heal for anyone else - that the greatest gift I can leave my own daughters is a mother who did her best to heal for myself.
If that is part of your story too, welcome. I hope that you remember you are not the boulders, the switchbacks, or the moments where you tread an old and accidental path…
You are the mountain.
xo
Melissa
If intergenerational healing is of interest to you, if you are working through a mother wound or cycle breaking, or if you’d just like to release old patterns that are no longer serving you, breathwork is an incredible healing modality. I hold monthly virtual breathwork ceremonies (and their replays for watching later) within my breathwork and writing membership: Living Questions, Breathing Answers.
In addition to the live breathwork there are replays, breathwork tracks on demand, live monthly journaling sessions, and a growing community of open-hearted people like you.) Learn more about my $19/month breathwork and writing membership here.
The Questions You'll Wish You Asked Time Capsule journals are a time machine disguised as a journal. Within it are prompts for parents and grandparents to tell their story, leave valuable wisdom, and create a legacy of love that will outlast all of us. A portion of all sales go to the American Brain Foundation or the Alzheimer’s Association. Are you asking the questions you'll wish you had?
Do you know a motherless mom? I made a few journals just for her. Learn more here.
Some other books that have helped in healing my own mother wound (if you click these links I receive a small affiliate benefit)
It Didn’t Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to Break the Cycle
(Fiction) Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood
A song that brings me to the thin place. Have a listen…